LABORatorio was named Riccardo Revelli to honor his memory.
Riccardo left us when he was just fifty, having been for many years the reference person of many friends and colleagues, for his intelligence, his culture, his intellectual honesty and his extraordinary generosity towards colleagues, transmitting ideas and insights that many other researchers would have kept and used by themselves.
All studies undertaken in LABORatorio since its birth, many still in progress, have retained his imprint and inspiration. It was his, still in the eighties, the idea of transforming administrative data to construct micro-databases - then non-existent - for scientific research: a task also extraordinarily innovative to the state of the art in the discipline. Riccardo was awarded the Saint Vincent Economics Prize 1993 for "Enterprise, employment and wages under the microscope" (written with Bruno Contini), judged the best Italian book of 1992 in economics.
Riccardo had had no academic position until the year preceding his end. Has always worked in a small but extremely lively Turin Cooperative Research Center, called “Researches and Projects”, refusing even a position as research director at ISTAT, as he did not believe this would allow him to maintain his independence of thought. But the unanimous recognition of his scientific contributions from respected colleagues persuaded him to join an associate professor competition, and - virtually unprecedented event in the academic world where outsiders are almost always excluded - he won.
Riccardo remains in our heart and in the memory of those who knew him and had the good fortune to work with him, and we now keep in our daily work his precious teaching.